I would expect it to read and write from a PAC Control table in the Opto date/time table format. There should also be options for just the date, just the time, and both with various international formats.

It would greatly simplify a lot of code - think about how many gadgets need to be placed on a groov screen to allow the user to enter the date and time and/or the parsing work required on the strategy side.

Something that should take a minute to do (if date/time gadget existed), now can take hours to get setup and working correctly and adds a lot of technical debt to our projects. Scheduling is very challenging on Opto, it would be nice to have more tools to make it easier.

I have EPIC setup, and been running continuously for a month now monitoring machine states.
I have one timer for each machine state. Guess what, timer resets to zero, at restart, or every time you download a PAC Control program.

If you expect EPIC to run full time. Timers should be persistent.
Any thoughts?

Not having a Date Time picker in both groov and PAC Display is definitely costing sales.
We wind up having to develop in other environments that make customers wonder why we don’t just use some other system. Most of our customers deal with dates and times in one form or another.

I have the same experience as Norm. We see PAC Display on life support and groov just isn’t capable enough in a lot of situations - it’s great that it is all html5 and works in a web browser without plugins, but it lacks the tools we need to build robust HMIs in a time efficient manner for anything but small projects.

I really hate saying this because I would really like to see it succeed!

Couldn’t agree with Philip more. Cyrano, Factory Floor and now PAC Display have all been great sales tools. Because they let us empower our customers, customers then get comfortable and are willing to try Opto22. Today we have more competition than ever and we often have to build demos around the projects a customer may have in mind, rather than the old “Demo Center” model. This type of targeted sales has proven to work for our group. But it is time consuming and expensive for us compared to traditional and obsolete “Distributor” models. So from where I sit PAC Display needs to continue with refinement and improvement (glad to see recent progress in that area). We also need groov to do much more than it does now, sooner rather than later, and bug free